Tuesday, October 13, 2009

NYC public schools -- stimulus waste, merit pay reward.

The $1 billion in stimulus cash being spent in city schools this year has not created new jobs, and may be one of worst uses of funds aimed at jumpstarting the economy, experts say.

The Department of Education doled out $625 million this year to 1,475 schools, instructing that most of the money go for staffers that "would otherwise have been cut." The rest is helping pay the rising cost of fringe benefits and administrative costs.

"Most of this money is going for personnel with higher salaries and pension costs," she said, noting that 13,157 DOE staffers make six figures.

"The city's crumbling infrastructure is getting short shrift because powerful special interests like education unions squawk the loudest."... [NY Post]

We've seen that before -- as with the transit workers union (already getting paid like this) taking $350 million of stimulus money from subway construction for an 11% pay wage for itself. (One wonders what the "multiplier" for that is.)

But on the happier side of the education ledger...

Charter teachers $oar as their pupils score

Nearly 350 teachers and other staffers at 10 city charter schools raked in more than $1.5 million this year in a groundbreaking merit-pay program that ties bonuses directly to how their students fare, The Post has learned...

Teachers and other staffers who participated in the Partnership for Innovation in Compensation for Charter Schools (PICCS) program earned an average of $4,480 in bonus pay ...

The payments ranged from $1,400 to $8,800 because of the formula tying bonuses to student performance -- something that opponents of merit pay have said fosters unhealthy competition among teachers in the same building.

And while the United Federation of Teachers opposes tying teachers' appraisals to their kids' test scores, even instructors in the three unionized charter schools that participated in the initiative touted its merits.

"When it's done correctly, the focus is on the student -- not what the teacher can do," said Lisa DiGaudio, 34, a sixth-grade teacher and UFT member at Merrick Academy Charter School in Queens. "In my building, really we worked together -- we never had discussions about competition."...

Her school raised reading-test passing rates by 18 percentage points this past school year, to 88 percent, and lifted math-test passing rates by 14 points, to 98 percent.

"[The program's] gotten more people talking, but it's not a discussion about how much money we've gotten," said DiGaudio. "It's about what can we do next."... [NY Post]

It's too bad the smartly spent money amounts to so much less than the rest, but we'll take what we can.